Google Hire’s candidate discovery tool exits beta

Google Hire, the hiring dashboard that’s part of Google’s enterprise-focused G Suite platform, launched a little over a year ago in June. Since then, it’s gained a feature — candidate discovery — that surfaces appropriate candidates for new gigs at a company, along with a veritable suite of AI-powered calendar scheduling, resume review, and phone call tools. Today, candidate discovery, which rolled out to select customers in beta earlier this year, is becoming generally available to all G Suite customers who pay for Hire.

Coinciding with candidate discovery’s wider launch, Google’s debuting a new capability that product manager Omar Fernandez says was informed by Hire’s beta testers. It allows customers to screen resumes with smart keyword highlighting based on their search criteria, and to re-engage qualified candidates in bulk.

“Throughout the beta period, we listened to customer feedback, and as a result [we introduced this] new feature in candidate discovery,” he wrote in a blog post. “Since the … release of candidate discovery … we’ve heard from many customers how it’s helped them quickly fill open roles at their companies … [One company] was able to fill one of its roles in 24 hours (the average time to hire is four weeks).”

Two of those customers are OpenLogix, a global technology service firm, and Titmouse, an animation studio. OpenLogix uses candidate discovery to search a database of 30,000 prior candidates and create a prioritized list based on how well the candidate’s profile matches the title, job description, and location. Meanwhile, Titmouse taps it to manage thousands of applications submitted through the company’s careers page.

Fernandez noted that candidate discovery is powered by Google’s Cloud Talent Solution (formerly Cloud Job Discovery), a development platform for job search workloads that factors in desired commute time, mode of transit, and other preferences in matching employers with job seekers. It also drives automated job alerts and saved search alerts.

According to Google, CareerBuilder, which uses Cloud Talent Solution, saw a 15 percent lift in users who view jobs sent through alerts and 41 percent increase in “expression of interest” actions from those users.

Hire, for the uninitiated, is a full stack recruitment tool that lets hiring managers sift through job listings, interview and screen candidates, solicit applications, and more. It natively integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Sheets, automatically filling in details such as contact information in invites and recording data captured across interviews. Moreover, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), it’s able to recommend appropriate time slots for meetings and interviews, analyze key terms in job descriptions, and highlight candidates’ phone numbers and log calls.

News of candidate discovery’s general availability follows on the heels of Google’s job search feature for military veterans, which launched in August. It aims to make it easier for service members to find civilian jobs that align with their occupation, in part by finding jobs in their area that require skills similar to those used in their military role.

Companies that use Cloud Talent Solution can implement the job search feature on their own career sites.